Incident Report

Subject:             Database Provides Information useful in Predicting Pipeline Failure

Date of Email report:   Wed 08/09/2010

Report Detail:

The UKOPA (UK Oil Pipeline Association) report of pipeline product loss incidents covering 1962-2008 presents collaborative pipeline and product loss incident data from onshore Major Accident Hazard Pipelines. It contains data on pipeline failures and on part-wall damage. The report says that using Structural Reliability Analysis it is possible to use the data provided to determine the range of defect dimensions that will cause a specific pipeline to fail; analysis of the statistical distributions of actual defect dimensions from the part-wall defect data allows the probability of a critical defect to be determined and failure frequencies for any credible failure mechanism to be calculated.